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Trout is the rare Major League player who can do it all. The five-tool
player who can run, throw, field, hit and hit with power. Other players
fitting this rare description include 2013 NL MVP Andrew McCutchen of
the Pirates, Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez, Colorado’s Carlos Gonzalez and
Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig, the Cuban sensation whose own rookie
debut was nearly as sensational as that of Trout’s.
Last season, nine players hit at least 20 home runs and stole 20
bases. Ten years earlier, in 2003, there were six. In 1993 there were 12,
but all the way back in 1983 there were but five. So the five-tool player
is rare indeed.
Such early stardom could hardly have been predicted for Trout even
after he was picked 25th player overall in the 2009 MLB Draft following
his senior season at Millville High School in New Jersey. Greg Morhardt
was the Angels’ area scout for the Northeast prior to that 2009 draft,
and he followed Trout closely. In the Twins’ minor league system in the
1980s, Morhardt was a teammate of Mike’s father, Jeff, a pitcher. Jeff
was also coaching Mike on the Millville baseball team, and father and
son had many conversations with scouts like Morhardt.
At the time, young Mike stood out on a baseball field because his
build was more like that of a safety in football, which happened to be the
same position he played on the gridiron. Tall, with a thick upper body
and powerful legs, Trout was a physical specimen hardly ever seen on a
baseball field. But he could do everything he wanted on the field, and he
rose up the draft boards for so many teams.
“In my scouting report, I wrote: ‘He’s going to make a lot of All-Star
teams and he has a chance to be a Hall of Fame player,’” says Morhardt.
“You can’t go much higher than that.
“You might write that down about one, two or three times in a career
out of one area.”
Says Morhardt, now a national cross checker for the Angels. He
says that the only other time he’d written about a player’s Hall of Fame
potential was when he did so for Matt Harvey, when the future Mets All-
Star was in high school. Morhardt also looked back at his own playing
career, when he’d been a finalist for the 1984 U.S. Olympic team, to get a
comparison for Trout as a high school player. That collection of baseball
players included future All-Stars Barry Larkin, Will Clark, Mark McGwire
and B.J. Surhoff. (Ed Note: Baseball was a demonstration sport during
the 1984 Olympic Games and the U.S. would lose to Japan, 6-3.)
“I remember what they were like at 18 or 19 years old, and Mikey
at 17 was better than everybody,” says Morhardt. “Mike was faster and
stronger than Barry Bonds. Will Clark, I never competed against anyone
who competed as in your face harder than Will Clark did. He was a great
hitter, tough in the clutch. Mikey was still technically better because he had
speed, power, makeup. So I was comparing him to those types of players
because those were the players I knew best. I’m looking at Mike at 17, and
he was better than all of them. And they’re as good as our game gets.”
In the annals of baseball history, it was only in the ’50s when players
like Mantle, Willie Mays, and Henry Aaron showed the ability to hit
One of the best five-tool
players in the ‘80s, Eric
Davis knows how the rare
breed can dominate the
game singlehandedly.
McCutchen
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